A series of leaks this summer revealed that the National Security Agency uses novel interpretations of U.S. law to gather data in bulk from the world’s largest Internet companies. Now new reports on the NSA’s technical capabilities suggest that the agency can actually read most online communications without going directly to service providers at all.
The New York Times, citing documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, reports that the NSA has “circumvented or cracked much of the encryption” used online. Such capabilities could be very powerfully combined with the access the agency is known to have to traffic carried by Internet service providers and major international telecommunications cables.
“This suggests that they no longer have to go to, say, Google; they can decrypt data from AT&T or use their own infrastructure, for example, on the undersea cables,” says Dan Auerbach, a staff technologist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation.